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Publication If You Build It, They Will Come: From Flood Zone to Economic Boom(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019) Berardi, BenOn July 30, 1993, the newly-unified city of Chesterfield, Missouri bore witness to the most tumultuous disaster since its incorporation in 1988. The levee surrounding the area, fittingly named the Gumbo Flats, breeched in four separate places, the result of a perfect storm of high winter snow volumes and dangerously high levels of rainfall, among a multitude of other indirect factors. Massive flooding drowned the lowland area, leaving the entire Valley submerged under eleven feet of water. But the flood itself is not the focal point of this article; the real story is how a suburban town, barely five years old, rallied around its residents, city officials, state legislators, and federal agencies to restore, renovate and evolve the Chesterfield Valley area into a real estate goldmine. By analyzing hundreds of city press releases and examining administrative action plans, I determined the critical decisions made regarding the renovation of the levee and the sources of funding that built the now-thriving Chesterfield Commons. In particular, levee enlargement and tax increment financing (TIF) catalyzed the creation of a corporate and community real estate mecca. Throughout the history of modern disasters, the profitability of capitalism in the wake of a disaster has proven to be a common, and primary, factor in successful restoration and rejuvenation projects. Kevin Rozario, author of What Comes Down Must Go Up, presents the idea of creative destruction as a basis for how disasters pave the way for capitalistic business endeavors. He argues, “so deeply has the link between disaster and development become that even those who have fought most vigorously to contain the ravages of capital have tended to view further destruction as the necessary precondition for healing modernity’s harms” . The Chesterfield Valley is an exemplary model of this belief system, a true “out of the ashes rises the phoenix,” where ingenuity and community came together to direct infrastructure development, and an entire town’s willingness to inject finances where they were needed most established the foundation for a suburban city’s billion-dollar-and-counting economic powerhouse.Publication Fritz Kuhn's Nazi America: Kuhn's Growth and Destruction of the German American Bund in the 1930s(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019-04) Wolf, CameronThe German American Bund was the most influential and dangerous American Nazi organization to exist before the destruction of Hitler’s Germany. Building itself from the remnants of two Nazi organizations that failed to establish any kind of true legitimacy, the Bund saw an explosion of its’ prestige due to their leader: Fritz Kuhn. This paper will argue that no other group established themselves to the same degree, as a legitimate Nazi Organization within American culture as the German American Bund. Conversely as the perception of the Bund within society grew as a legitimate threat to democracy as Hitler’s army moved throughout Europe, the social conditions within the United States during the 1930s exacerbated the attraction to the Bund and inflamed the desire of the government to see the Bund’s demise. It is vitally important to understanding how Nazism, and political dissidence gains attraction and support as there has been a resurgence of pro-Nazi activity within culture today.Publication Demons & Devils: The Moral Panic Surrounding Dungeons & Dragons, 1979-1991(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019-04) Wilson, AustinPublication The Great Italian Educator: The Montessori Method and American Nativism in the 1910s(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019-04) Klaske, Elise M.The purpose of this project is to investigate to what extent Protestant nativism impeded the spread of the Montessori Method in the United States. The Montessori Method has experienced waves of popularity in America ever since it was first introduced in 1910. During the first wave of popularity, from 1910-1917, Dr. Maria Montessori, the founder, faced backlash from educators and educational philosophers for her scientific reasoning and her pedagogical and social philosophies. Some Montessori historians believe that these factors were critical in halting the spread of the Montessori Method in America in 1917. An additional theory is that Montessori’s personal identity, as an Italian Catholic woman, impeded the reception of her ideas in America. Considering that the time period was characterized by anti-Catholic rhetoric from political organizations as well as newspapers and journals, the theory makes sense. Research for this project was conducted by examining newspaper publications that covered the Montessori Method, rebuttals of the method published by American educators, and the books and articles written by Montessori advocates. Other primary sources include Catholic publications and Dr. Montessori’s own books and writings. Secondary sources, such as autobiographies of Maria Montessori’s life and examinations of nativist activity at the beginning of the 20th Century, help paint a picture of the state of America when Dr. Montessori visited in 1913. Overall, these sources indicate that anti-Catholic sentiments played a minor role, if any, in hampering the spread of the Montessori Method. Maria Montessori’s publicist, Samuel S. McClure, crafted a particular public image for Montessori, compatible with themes of social reform, Progressive educational reform, and feminism, which would appeal to most Americans. The creation of this public image is significant as it was a manifestation of the cultural upheaval experienced during the early 20th century and had lasting implications for Progressive education and the future of the Montessori Method in America. Supporters for the method emphasized the scientific foundation of the method, Dr. Montessori’s ideas for social reform through education, and the compatibility of the method with American ideals of individual freedom and responsibility. In the end, other factors such as leading educators’ disapproval of different aspects of the method, World War I, and Dr. Montessori’s personality led to the decline of the Montessori Method in America at that time.Publication Coping Through Curse: Confronting British Metropolitan Identity Through the "Curse of Tutankhamen" (1923-1933)(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019-05) Hollman, Olivia G.This thesis seeks to understand the origins of the curse of Tutankhamen within interwar British society and to explain why the British were willing to believe in the “curse of Tutankhamen” between 1923 and 1933. It argues that the curse served as a method of coping as the British reforged their rational, Enlightened ways with irrational imaginings to deflect feelings of trauma after the First World War and of vulnerability with the loss of Egypt as a protectorate in 1922. Just as the British newspapers evaded discussing the true story of the archaeological dig of the tomb of Tutankhamen, so too did the British use their own imperial ideas of Egyptian Romantic allure to circumvent the reality of Egyptians through the curse of Tutankhamen. I argue that the curse of Tutankhamen was a British-created myth with necessary Egyptian influences that served to preserve British imperial views of the “other” in the wake of World War One (1914-1918) and the British Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence on February 28, 1922. Importantly, this thesis maintains that the veracity of the curse itself is secondary to the cultural effects of the purported curse in the British metropole. The curse of Tutankhamen was a myth born out of the British metropole-favored imagination and threating comparison with the Empire inherent in Orientalism. By analyzing coverage in British newspapers such as The Times and The Daily Mail and the accounts of later historians such as Allegra Fryxell and Roger Luckhurst, this thesis argues that the British authored and perpetuated the “curse of Tutankhamen,” by basing the curse within British perceptions of modern and ancient Egypt. The curse symbolized the mythological arrival of the periphery of the British Empire within British metropolitan identity.Publication Shifts in Tone: The Effects of the First World War on Classical Music(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019-04) Halliwell, DavidThis paper explores how the First World War affected the lives and compositions of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Maurice Ravel, and Arnold Schoenberg, three well-known twentieth-century composers who fought in the conflict on the British, French, and Austrian sides. The war affected the lives and compositions of these three men in significant, enduring, and divergent ways. The sharp differences in their compositional reactions to the war owe primarily to these authors' previous compositional styles, particularly their prewar approach to tonality, and their divergent wartime experiences, such as the extent of military service and traumatic events that paralleled the war. Despite their differences, a commonality was present; the war prompted these composers to change their view of tonality. More broadly, the war also led to compositions that were characteristically darker, more somber, and dedicated to the injured and deceased.Publication The Qipao: Defining Modern Women in the First Half of the 20th Century(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019-04) Cox, AdriennePublication Blood on the Plow: Extremist Group Activity During the 1980s Farm Crisis in Kansas(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019-05) Correll, CalebPublication Defining the Music of America's White Rural Working Class From the 1920s through the 1950s(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2019-04) Becker, ThomasThis thesis discusses the recordings of hillbilly and folk music cut by record company agents and folklorists from the 1920s through the 1940s. These years saw the rise of recorded music as mass entertainment in the United States, and therefore are of importance as a watershed moment in the development of American music. The similarities and differences between the group of Artist and Repertoire men that recorded hillbilly music (along with many other varieties of American music) and the group of folklorists who recorded folk music are important in understanding the different ways that Americans have thought about the music of the white working class. This thesis argues that both the hillbilly and folk recordings were parallel attempts to synthesize music of and for the white working class. This paper focuses on the ideas of Alan Lomax, and accesses his letters and documents created for the Library of Congress to discuss his vision for “white folk music” as a cohesive and ongoing musical tradition produced and consumed by white Americans. This vision resembles the place in American society that hillbilly and later country music came to occupy. Given that the two genres were both intended as products of and for the white, rural working class, the most important difference between the recordings is in the reason that they were made. While Lomax had lofty ambitions for his music as a top-down movement propagated by public programs such as the Archive of American Folk Song, the record company agents simply did their best to exploit what they saw as a business opportunity. Although they did not necessarily see some cultural value in their version of the music of the white working class, the record company A&R men laid the groundwork for something similar to Lomax’ vision for “white folk music.”Publication Defensive Humanitarianism: Swiss Internment Camps During WWI(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Zimmerman, HoldenDuring World War I, the Swiss state interned nearly 30,000 foreign soldiers who had previously been held in POW camps in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Austria, and Russia. The internment camp system that Switzerland implemented arose from a Swiss diplomatic platform that this thesis describes as defensive humanitarianism. By offering good offices to the belligerent states of WWI, the Swiss state utilized humanitarian law both to secure Swiss neutrality and to alleviate, to a degree, the immense human suffering of the war. This thesis fills a gap in the historiographical literature as one of the few papers in English on the topic, as well as one of the only to holistically consider the internment camp system as a panacea for the crises that the Swiss state faced during WWI. By mixing domestic concerns with international diplomacy and humanitarianism, a domestic policy platform taken to the international diplomatic level succeeded in building enough trust between the signatory states to create an internment system that reconceptualized the treatment of foreign soldiers from the holding of prisoners to the healing of men.Publication It’s Time to Talk of Other Things: of Black Power, War, and Beauty Queens(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Vasquez, Alyssa D.The history of military entertainment has become more popular in recent years as scholars have begun to identify the insights that studying entertainment reveals about culture and institutions. This thesis presents a piece of this growing historiography by analyzing the roles of three Miss Black America pageant winners who toured Vietnam in 1970, 1971, and 1972. Despite the variable and sometimes unclear roles of these women, they ultimately boosted the morale of black service members and became symbols of black power, black beauty, and black culture during their tours.Publication “Associated Women Sycophants”: Sorority Women and Changing Gender Roles at the University of Kansas, 1948-1973(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) O'Sullivan, Shea E.This thesis aims to study the different social expectations of University of Kansas sorority women and the evolution of those social mores over time. Very little study on this topic has been done previously. Beth Bailey’s Sex in the Heartland is one of the few works that discusses the Associated Women Students in relation to the sexual revolution at KU but does not include extensive discussion of sorority women’s roles. From its founding in 1948 until its reinvention in 1970, the Associated Women Students (AWS) was the authority for University of Kansas (KU) women regarding all regulations and social events that placed desirability and emphasis a more socially conservative college woman. Integral to these operations were KU sorority women, who were significantly involved within the AWS and strong believers in social conservatism. Sororities utilized the infrastructure of the AWS to provide consistent and effective resistance to changes in gender roles and sexual mores for women. Historically, the years 1948-1975 at the University of Kansas are significant because it shows a regional version of change that reflects national trends.Publication Tackling Textbooks of the Times: The Telling Truth About Race in Textbooks from 1945-1970(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Meyer, Anna ShirleyAs a key classroom tool, textbooks offer concrete insights from the past. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal’s study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, convinced Americans that the issue of American prejudice and racism could be eradicated using education. In response, intellectuals, educators, and activists moved the front of the battle against racial prejudice and discrimination to the classrooms and textbooks. In the Cold War geopolitical context and the American Civil Rights Movement, the approach to teaching race shifted rapidly and dramatically between 1945 and 1970. This thesis examines how textbooks shifted due to these influences to show how intellectuals, educators, and activists shaped their attempts to solve the American dilemma. However, textbooks are not without their own limitations. In the twenty-five years after World War II, textbook publishing and adoption rates were generally slow and new classroom sets were expensive. The textbook lag was acknowledged and somewhat amended through supplemental teaching material. Nevertheless, textbooks limited the success of education as the method in which to solve racial prejudice. An evaluation of the shifts textbooks did display, represents that the role of education in solving social issues is possible. There is hope for the future of education and textbooks, as technology continues to diminish the inherent limitations of textbooks.Publication "And He Was an Arab!": Imperial Femininity and Pleasure in E.M. Hull's 1919 Desert Romance, The Sheik(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Glennemeier, JaelynE.M. Hull’s sensational novel The Sheik thrilled and shocked early twentieth century readers with its tale of a woman’s journey into the Sahara desert and her interracial sexual desire for the brooding Arab sheik who captures her. The groundbreaking book made the mysterious and thrilling Arabian desert accessible to working class readership and broke the rules on what was acceptable on the written page. This paper contextualizes The Sheik within the “golden age” of women’s travel writing by comparing the journey of its heroine, Diana Mayo, to the non-fiction travel accounts of other pioneers of Middle Eastern travel. The memoirs of Gertrude Bell, Lady Mary Montagu, and E.M. Hull reveal an shared imperial identity unique to white women of the British Empire. It is an identity founded in the newly acquired autonomy granted to women through their physical mobility in the desert and their negotiations of gender in the early twentieth century. In exploring this identity, this paper demonstrates Hull’s use of fiction to test the bounds of white women’s engagement with the Middle East and their participation in the Orientalist fantasies based in sex, desire, and liberation from which they had been historically excluded.Publication Rewriting History: The Impact of the Cuban Missile Crisis on American Journalism(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Fay, Kelcie E.The Cuban Missile Crisis represented a unique moment in the history of American foreign policy because it was the first time that the world faced a nuclear standoff. The threat of a third World War allowed US government officials to deceive the press under the guise of protecting national security. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of thousands of documents from ex-Soviet and American archives, historians are rethinking the narrative of the Cuban Missile Crisis that has been presented in the press during and after the crisis. This paper will explore the relationship that President Kennedy cultivated with the press to promote his political agenda and the impact that this relationship had on the reporting of future foreign policy crises.Publication The Lion, The Rooster, And The Union: National Identity in the Belgian Clandestine Press, 1914-1918(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Dunn, Matthew R.Significant research has been conducted on the trials and tribulations of Belgium during the First World War. While amateur historians can often summarize the “Rape of Belgium” and cite nationalism as a cause of the war, few people are aware of the substantial contributions of the Belgian people to the war effort and their significance, especially in the historical context of Belgian nationalism. Relatively few works have been written about the underground press in Belgium during the war, and even fewer of those works are scholarly. The Belgian underground press attempted to unite the country's two major national identities, Flemings and Walloons, using the German occupation as the catalyst to do so. Belgian nationalists were able to momentarily unite the Belgian people to resist their German occupiers by publishing pro-Belgian newspapers and articles. They relied on three pillars of identity—Catholic heritage, loyalty to the Belgian Crown, and anti-German sentiment. While this expansion of Belgian identity dissipated to an extent after WWI, the efforts of the clandestine press still serve as an important framework for the development of national identity today. By examining how the clandestine press convinced members of two separate nations, Flanders and Wallonia, to re-imagine their community to the nation of Belgium, historians can analyze the successful expansion of a nation in a war-time context.Publication United Nations Resolutions 661: Intervention, Devastation and the Internal Collapse of 1990s Iraq(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Bieberly, MattieIn 1945, the United Nations was created to uphold international peace and security. In order to ensure prosperity for all members of the international community, the United Nations implements economic sanctions against countries that violate pre-determined standards. Such was the case in August of 1990; when the United Nations created UN Resolution 661 in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. What followed was a 13-year sanctions regime against Iraq that created a humanitarian crisis, specifically in the areas of healthcare, infrastructure, and domestic economy. The use of sanctions by the United Nations violated their purported goal of promoting peace and prosperity for all. Instead, sanctions create more instability for the states they are placed on and the UN continues to prey on vulnerable populations by instituting sanctions, as happened in Iraq with UN Resolution 661.Publication "The Fewer the Men, The Greater the Honor": The Naval Doctrine of Republicanism in the First Barbary War(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Bednasek, Parker BlackThe First Barbary War was a naval conflict fought between the United States and Tripoli from 1801-1805 over the payment of “tribute” to Tripoli so they would not seize American merchant ships. The Jefferson Administration believed that the war would not take more than a few months but it ended up lasting a desultory four years. There were two main theoretical concepts that impacted the war – the idea of the proper role and size of a republican military power and the internal struggle of the U.S. Navy for professionalism and leadership. These two concepts influenced the development of the naval doctrine of republicanism for the U.S. Navy which can be characterized by limited size, firm, yet humane leadership, and aggressiveness toward the enemy. This doctrine is best exemplified by Commodore Edward Preble’s who had a great impact on the young naval officers who fought under him and who would come to lead the U.S. Navy for years afterwardsPublication "I've Tried so Hard to Make Good Americans Out of You": Legacy, Memory, and the Seattle General Strike of 1919(Department of History, University of Kansas, 2018) Ammon, Kathryn GreyThis historical project explores competing legacies and formation of memory within the Seattle General Strike of 1919 both in its after effects on the Seattle Labor Movement and the nation as a whole through the First Red Scare. This paper is divided into three chapters, an examination of the strike, national and local media coverage of the strike, and an examination of national and local repercussions from the strike. The Seattle General Strike of 1919 existed within an intersection of many disparate movements—and truly has been memorialized as more than the sum of its parts. The Seattle General Strike has not been evaluated within the context of differing pro-capitalist and pro-worker solidarity viewpoints and how these two stories split, which this thesis will do.Publication Marriage Contracts in Fifteenth-Century Normany: An Examination of MSD47 at the Spencer Research Library(Department of History, University of Kansas, 1992-01-01) Whittaker, Beth M.